Journey to Node.js

I love to explore new tech and add new skills to my arsenal. I don’t outsource work so on every project I work I am like the lone ranger (without Tonto). It’s essential that I know some back end stuff. While my focus is primarily front end development and PHP mostly hacking away at WordPress sites and occasionally creating something from scratch. But as a front end dev I love JavaScript. It intrigues me to no end. It’s just an awesome language that so many devs take for granted and it doesn’t get the credit it deserves or at least it used to. With all the new tech talk floating around and the community all a buzz about the new kid on the block node.js is making it’s impact felt. Wanting to expand and get my back end skills up to par with the rest of the world I started looking into what I should learn. I had to make a decision and thought really hard on what I should do. What about Ruby on Rails? Should I try out ASP.net? Hey what’s this node.js?

The answer was simple why not improve my JavaScript skills and learn node. Node is amazing and is on it’s way to forever changing the way we think about the web. I’m sure you have heard it all before but Node is anon blocking server-side language written with, you guessed it, JavaScript. Wow JavaScript on the server! That is a front end developers dream. Isn’t it? Of course it is and it is because of forward thinking people that this is possible and I have to say it’s awesome. The possibilities are astounding and it’s fast I mean real fast. Imagine an pipeline that sends components down to be assembled. But the pipeline is narrow and you have to wait or each piece individually to reach the end and get spit out. If something gets stuck the whole pipeline gets clogged up and you have to wait even longer until that piece works it’s way through. That is what the traditional web is like. It’s blocking, meaning that each bit of code sends the information from the server and the server processes it and when it’s done processing it the bit of code runs and so on. But with node it’s like exchanging the single pipeline with a huge sliding system. If a piece is taking longer than the rest of the parts the rest of the parts simply go around. It’s a non blocking system. This is great because it means that as an application scales it stays fast it doesn’t seem to matter how much you throw at it. Compared to php, ruby, or other programming languages well, they don’t compare. It’s that fast.

I made up my mind and it’s official I will be learning node.js and I invite you to follow along as I take my Journey to Node.